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Less than two years after taking over Twitter, now X, Elon Musk has managed to lose the company access to its third largest market and reportedly more than 40 million users. And despite his bravado online, he seems to have backed himself into a corner.
Brazil’s decision to block X is the culmination of an ongoing conflict between Musk and the country’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE), a special court run by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes that issued takedown orders on content it considers to be a threat to the integrity of its elections. Musk and X refused to comply, allowing accounts that were accused of spreading hate speech and disinformation to remain on the platform, a move that eventually triggered the ban.
Starlink was caught in the crosshairs too: The court froze the assets of Musk’s other company, saying it was part of the same “economic group” as X given its ownership, for possible use to pay off fines owed by X. When the block came into effect Monday, Starlink allowed its customers—more than 250,000 people, according to the company— to circumvent the X ban by using its satellite internet connection. After initial resistance, Starlink backed down and said it would comply. Experts who spoke to WIRED say that increasingly, it seems that Musk has overplayed his hand.
“I think he is realizing Brazilians are not going to take to the streets because X is suspended,” says Nina Santos, a researcher at the Brazilian National Institute of Science & Technology for Digital Democracy. “Brazilian institutions are not going to back off just because Musk is cursing online.”
In response to a request for comment, an X spokesperson directed WIRED to a post from the platform's Global Affairs team. “To our users in Brazil and around the world, X remains committed to protecting your freedom of speech,” the post reads in part.
Meanwhile, Musk has continued to antagonize the court. Last week, he posted a seemingly AI-generated image of Moraes behind bars, with the accompanying text alleging, “One day, Alexandre, this picture of you in prison will be real,” and another comparing him to the Harry Potter villain Voldemort.
“Ever since April, he has been toying with the image of Moraes, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and escalated in a problematic way,” alleges Bruna Santos, a researcher and activist with the civil society coalition Coalizão Direitos na Rede in Brazil. “He was fully aware and he knew what the consequences would be.”
WIRED reported how employees scrambled to avoid a legal crisis when Musk took over Twitter in 2022, just days before Brazil’s presidential runoffs. The company was served a consent decree from the judiciary, warning that if it didn’t keep its promises to keep safeguards around the elections in place, it risked being blocked. At the time, the country’s then president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his supporters allegedly spread disinformation about the security of the country’s elections to cast doubt on the results. Musk had promised a rollback of the company’s existing content moderation policies, and promised a sort of “free speech absolutism” that, in practice, has let hate speech and mis- and disinformation flow freely on the platform.
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At the time, the trust and safety staff, the people who kept violative content off of Twitter, were able to persuade Musk to keep the platform’s safeguards on during the elections. But less than a week later, most of them were fired along with almost 50 percent of the company’s staff in the first wave of layoffs.
As part of his effort to make X a free-for-all of free speech, Musk reinstated the accounts of far-right influencers like Allan dos Santos, who fled Brazil in 2020 to avoid being investigated for spreading disinformation. After Bolsonaro lost the election, some of his supporters stormed the Brazilian legislature on January 8, 2023, and since then, the TSE has been investigating the events leading up to the insurrection. Accounts like dos Santos’ were targeted by a TSE investigation launched in April and were the subject of the court’s takedown orders.
Musk has likened Moraes to a dictator, alleging that the court is forcing censorship. (Musk has, however, complied without complaint with blocking orders in places like Turkey and India, where they have been used to censor journalists and opposition.)
And while Ivar Hartmann, an associate professor of law at the Insper Institute of Education and Research in São Paulo, alleges that Moraes has stretched the power of the court to new—and possibly concerning—levels, he claims it is also important to distinguish between a democracy with different rules and a dictatorship.
In 2019, Brazil’s TSE court launched a fake news inquiry, headed up by Moraes. Since then, he has become a controversial figure. Some see him as defending the country’s democracy; others, like Hartmann, worry he may have accrued too much power.
“This is not Venezuela [where international observers widely believe President Nicolás Maduro rigged the country’s July elections],” he says. “Even if you wanted to argue that the type of court orders we've seen regarding social media platforms in Brazil in the past two or three years are shocking, which I would agree with, you don't see [Meta CEO Mark] Zuckerberg going online and openly criticizing the courts and denying compliance with court orders in Brazil.”
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Nina Santos says that even if there are valid criticisms of the approach Moraes has taken, Musk should comply with the court order and argue against them in court later. “We can discuss the decisions taken by the Brazilian court, but not whether Musk should comply with the Brazilian court or not.”
Musk’s response to the court order was to then break another Brazilian law. Like many countries, Brazil requires certain international companies appoint an in-country representative that can be contacted by the government and, in some cases, held responsible for a company’s failures to comply with the law. India, Vietnam, Turkey, and Russia all have similar laws.
On August 19, X announced it was closing its office after its in-country representative was threatened with prison time for the company’s noncompliance with the TSE’s orders. In closing the office, X was also suddenly in violation of Brazil’s localization laws. A suspension, at that point, says João Brant, digital policy secretary for Brazil’s Secretariat of Social Communication, was inevitable. “In a situation where a person like Musk was trying to pick and choose which orders he would abide by, it was necessary,” he says.
At this point, Musk has exhausted most avenues of escalation with the judiciary. And though he pulled SpaceX employees out of Brazil, he has already shown signs of wavering, at least when it comes to Starlink. Brant says that it is unlikely that Starlink will face any further consequences so long as it stays within the bounds of Brazilian law.
“We hope [X] complies with the court rulings so the service can be reestablished,” he says. “We're not happy, but we just think the responsibility is Musk’s.”
His last hope may be a challenge to the block brought by some of the country’s conservative politicians. On Thursday, Brazilian judge Kassio Nunes Marques ruled that all 11 of the country’s Supreme Court justices needed to decide on whether the platform should continue to be suspended (Moraes had initially ruled alone, and then a smaller selection of judges upheld his decision).
Members of the court did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
